British Secret Services’ Political Agency and the Intelligence Intervention in the Russian North in 1918-1919

Ivanov Andrei Alexandrovich ORCID: 0000-0003-4097-9447 Doctor of History Associate Professor, Department of History and Philosophy, Saint Petersburg State University of Veterinary Medicine 196084, Russia, g. Saint Petersburg, ul. Chernigovskaya, 5 ivanovaa85@list.ru Other publications by this author

As a rule, the term «intervention» in being used in the meaning of violent interference of one state into the affairs of another state ^{[8, ñ. 134; 3, ñ. 332]}. This definition is well-established, but, describing a special type of international conflicts, does not allow understanding either the reasons or goals of the intervention, or the specific means used to achieve these goals, or the system of relations arising in its process, between the opposing sides.We are inclined to the idea that an «intervention» can only be called an operation that is carried out in countries where serious internal social-political (or ethnic) contradictions already exist, have passed into the phase of armed struggle, or have a tendency to do so. This is a fundamental difference from the «invasion», which is mainly directed against internally stable states, and has as its purpose, precisely, the destabilization of the situation in order to extract benefits (territorial seizures, imposition of indemnity, spread of influence, etc.).

In theory, the interventionist state must necessarily be impartial and not have any political or economic interest in the outcome of the conflict.But although foreign interventions are also often aimed at deriving benefits, they presuppose obtaining them by settling conflicts in a certain territory, but not provoking it. Actually, the end of the conflict can be achieved not through peace agreements, but through the military defeat of one or more opposing groups. In fact, it can be assumed that the actions of the initiators of the intervention represent an attempt to resolve the internal conflict with the help of the external one.

As S. Huntington put it, «the political reasons provoking military intervention ... lie in the absence or weakness of effective political institutions in the society» ^{[2, ñ. 195-196]}, that is, the internal weakness, and not at all strength, of the state creates the preconditions for foreign intervention.Moreover, military interventions do not take place «in a vacuum», and have never been completely unexpected; they are born out of a series of serious political crises in far from prosperous countries. By the time foreign troops enter the territory of an independent state, the legitimacy of the current government is already in doubt, as it was in Cuba in 1906 or in Soviet Russia in 1918. However, the assessment of the internal political state of such countries is usually based on empirical data collected by different governmental agencies.

This circumstance creates a problem called «McNamara’s law», named after the US Secretary of Defense and sounding as follows: «It is impossible to predict with a high degree of confidence what the effects of the use of military force will be, because of the risks of accident, miscalculation, misperception, and inadvertence» ^{[15, ñ. 186]}. If we take into account, that the receipt of information, assessment of its reliability, interpretation and wording of recommendations to the government belongs to the competence of intelligence agencies, the success of many military-political operations often depends of the effectiveness of their direct work and the quality of interaction with other institutes.

In theory, the adoption of military-political decisions is carried out in accordance with the sequence «observation – orientation – decision – action». It is often accepted that intelligence in this scheme traditionally plays a key role at the first stage («observation»), and then its role gradually decreases (unless the «action» stage is directly associated with its functions). Proceeding from this, the idea of the auxiliary or resource-saving nature of the work of the state security bodies was widespread in the scientific and expert community. However, the political history of the XX century shows that this statement was not always true.

In this regard, it is worth mentioning an article by V. Shlykov «Back into the Future, or Cold War lessons for Russia» ^[12]. The author – a former deputy chairman of the Russian Federation State Committee for Defense Issues – described in detail how during the Cold War intelligence agencies manipulated politicians in both the United States and the USSR. The instruments of these manipulations were intelligence reports with an assessment of the enemy’s military-technical potential, which not only didn’t correspond to the real facts, but also could not be double-checked by state leaders.

We believe that such situations are a reflection not so much of mistakes in organizing the work of intelligence, as of a purposeful strategy of its heads. In should be assumed that in the XX century, special services were often able to operate outside the law framework, conducting operations that were not always consistent with the political course of the government ^[6]. In fact, special services were able to acquire the features of the «actor» of a military-political conflict which means that they had methods, techniques and resources at their disposal to provoke conflict situations, depending on own interests. In this vein, international struggle may well be a direct consequence of the actions of such subjects, who, with varying degrees of subjectivity, can use their resources to achieve their own goals, which makes it highly relevant to identify the role of each of them in the escalation of the conflict.

In this regard the «nudge theory» developed with the participation of the American economist R.H. Thaler is of great value. This author drew attention to the fact that due to the «bounded rationality» of economic actors in decision-making, even if there is a freedom of choice between different scenarios, it is possible to create such conditions when the leader will predictably lean towards point of view required by the «nudge» initiator. R. Thaler and C. Sunstein defined this as «any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behaviour in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives» ^{[14, ñ. 6]}. Taking into account their conclusions and arguments, it can be assumed that such methods of influencing can also be used in political sphere, namely, in the system of public administration, where the heads of ministries and departments regularly have to make individual and collective decisions.Accordingly, it is highly likely that, in order to overcome the potential opportunism of political leaders, top and middle-level intelligence supervisors (as well as ordinary agents) may have a desire to exert a «nudge» effect on their bosses.

We suppose that the roots of this model of activity are associated with the World War I, when the use of intelligence means to inspire the internal political destabilization of opponents has acquired a large scale.

The fact is that during the XIX century at the beginning of an armed struggle in any country, other states had almost every right to intervene into it, supporting one of the parties by practically any means; therefore, there was often no fundamental difference between the concepts of «intervention», «war» and «invasion». As a result, foreign interventions led to the internationalization of an internal armed conflict, even regardless of its intensity. Thus, the size of the military contingent sent to another country to conduct military-political operations was not decisive in this matter. The legitimacy of the intervention, as C.J. Le Mon states, depended only on the degree of weakening of the state, the scale of the conflict, the number of victims and the dynamics of escalation ^[4].

With the adoption of a set of international legal acts directly or indirectly restricting the right to military interference (the Hague Conventions 1899 and 1907, the Drago-Porter Convention 1907, etc.), the situation has changed. To understand the new circumstances, it should be borne in mind that, in contrast to the invasion, which is carried out exclusively through the use of armed forces, a much wider methodological arsenal began to be used in the implementation of the policy of intervention. Hence, open and covert interventions should be distinguished – if the former are carried out with an overt use of military force, the latter are implemented with the help of secret, covert methods and means. It became possible to intervene with the help of special intelligence and sabotage bodies, as well as means of diplomacy – blackmail, political assassinations, organization of conspiracies, etc. can nowadays be called forms of intervention. As a result, the negative impact of interventions was relatively lower compared to wars, since the use of fundamentally different methods and technologies. In fact, with the growing popularity of pacifism, as well as the strengthening of connections between countries, ensuring international security using the armed forces as a traditional tool appeared to be counterproductive. In the XX century, for example, economic interventions, which include financing of opposition forces; counterfeiting of national currency; economic sanctions, etc. became widespread. Such methods were used in 1951 against China after its entry into the Korean War, in 1972–1973 in Chile, in the 1980s against Nicaragua. Even the activities of the Comintern to finance socialist parties and groups in Europe and beyond can be considered a form of economic intervention.

At the beginning of the XX century, an arsenal of intelligence and counterintelligence methods was more suitable for the implementation of such measures. This process started during the preparation to the World War I. It was during this period that the intelligence agencies tended to separate from the armed forces, in the structure of which they were originally created, and turn into one of the sub-institutes of the political system. Their participation in the planning and implementation of foreign interventions was one of the manifestations of the strengthening of the role of these bodies in the political systems of national states, military-political blocs and international organizations.

The case of the British special services in the first quarter of the XX century is quite revealing. Initially, the secret services were relied on by the heads of the Entente countries (Great Britain and France) as bodies capable of providing reliable and objective information, which would make it possible to distance the analytical structures of the armed forces from interfering into political decision-making. Later, in the context of a full-scale armed conflict unfolding in Europe, the task of the special services consisted not only in obtaining and processing information or suppressing the activities of enemy agents, but also in ensuring the normal functioning of the military and civilian control apparatus, preventing the inhibition of the dynamics of its development.

During the World War I British intelligence and counterintelligence were entrusted with responsibilities not only for obtaining, verifying and processing information, but also for formulating recommendations to the heads of state, which had to take into account the widest range of possible factors and consequences (political, military, economic, etc.). In fact, intelligence services began to turn into «think tanks», forced to attract specialists from different fields and accumulate huge amounts of heterogeneous data.

In these circumstances, for the successful integration of special services into the system of political decision-making, it was necessary to rely on several basic principles and conditions ^{[1, ñ. 571]}:

1. using of up-to-date information (this is mainly a task of the agential network);
2. consensus between employees (to ensure this parameter, a high level of corporatism is required);
3. coordination of actions (ensured by the presence of «vertical» and «horizontal» links between departments);
4. impartial assessment of the facts (the implementation of this provision is within the competence of analytical services).

If any of these conditions is not met, various variants of dysfunctions in the system of political decision-making are possible.

During the period under review, the key problem in this context laid in the «impartial assessment of the facts» as far as most of the British intelligence officers were simply not trained in the basics of intelligence analysis, and were sometimes unable to distinguish reliable and relevant information received from agents from various fictions and falsifications. In fact, the recommendations to the War Cabinet were often made by intelligence officers and their heads not on the basis of facts, but more on the basis of scientific and theoretical concepts, stereotypes or ideological dogmas.

From this point of view, the effectiveness of intelligence and counterintelligence services could not be assessed through the prism of the number of spies caught or secret documents intercepted. On the contrary, an indicator of the quality of the work of the security agencies should have been the effectiveness of the functioning of those institutions that the special services were supposed to protect. To assess the effectiveness of the intelligence service, it should be taken into account that the expenditures on intelligence in Britain from 1914 to 1917 increased 6.9 times ^{[5, ñ. 75]} (which means that the capabilities of the special services to use secret agents, technical equipment, and the number of full-time agents also increased), but the casualties of the armed forces over the same period increased from 4.5% up to 10.8% of the total number of those mobilized. That is, the growth in the resources of the special services did not directly correlate with the increase in the efficiency of their work to meet the needs of the army and the state.

In a view of these circumstances, the intelligence services were forced to face the likely budget cuts with the end of World War I. In order to prevent such a scenario, the secret agencies had to prove their usefulness. This is how the model of «intelligence intervention» was born. The theoretical basis for such operations was the concept of «small wars» by the Director of Military Intelligence colonel C. Calwell. The essence of his idea was that the usage of regular troops in conflicts in «uncivilized» countries was counterproductive; therefore, in a situation of remoteness from the metropolis, weak infrastructure of the war theater, lack of accurate maps of the terrain, etc. perhaps the main means of achieving victory was the use of reconnaissance and sabotage methods. In other words, it was precisely the presence of effective intelligence services that was Britain’s main competitive advantage in local conflicts. Timely revealing of the enemy’s plans, organizing sabotage at strategic targets and guiding the actions of partisan detachments were to become the areas of activity of intelligence agencies that would ensure victory without the use of a large contingent of regular troops.

A territorial platform for this experiment turned out to be the Russian North in 1918–1919. Probably, it happened because the army command by 1918 proposed concentrating the main military efforts of the Empire on the Western Front, while D. Lloyd George was interested in other war theaters – for example, the events of the Russian Civil War or the situation in the Middle East. Without the support of the military elite, in order to achieve success on such fronts, the Prime Minister was forced to turn to other methods and technologies, the implementation of which became the prerogative of the special services.

A great amount of work has been done in the study of this issue by A.J. Plotke, whose monograph «Imperial spies invade Russia: The British Intelligence Interven­tions» made it possible to understand that the original plan for military intervention into the Soviet Republic in 1918 was not drawn up in government circles of Britain, but in the structure of its intelligence apparatus. And the first steps towards the escalation of the conflict were taken precisely by the employees of the special services, and not at all by the diplomats or the military ^{[11, ñ. 1-10]}.

Our analysis of agent-operative and information-analytical activities of the British intelligence services at different stages of the Soviet-British confrontation suggests that the intervention of 1918–1919 in the Russian North was not only military, but much more intelligence by its form. This can be seen at least from the fact that almost 20% of the officers of the intervention group «Eloup» (25 people out of 125) were included in its reconnaissance block ^{[8, ë. 106/1151]}, and upon arrival in Russia its share in the composition of the group should have been increased to 27%. The leading role of the special services in carrying out the intervention policy in the North was confirmed even by a special order of the General Staff, according to which the head of intelligence in the region, Lieutenant-Colonel K.J.M. Thornhill, was to be given «maximum freedom» in the military-political sphere, and he did not have to report on his actions to higher army commanders ^{[8, ë. 106/1161]}.

Although Major-General F. Poole was formally the commander of the «Eloup» group, the British special services retained control over the troops. Cadre intelligence officers interviewed and briefed the army officers selected to be sent to the North; intelligence agents were engaged in agitation and propaganda work among Russian citizens; finally, it were the heads of the special services that even made decisions on the formation of various military units in the region. According to the memoirs of the participants of the «northern expedition», there was no point in addressing the military command on many pressing issues – only the intelligence leaders in the region could provide a solution to most of the problems ^{[13, ñ. 125-126]}.

To be fair, it should be noted that a similar scenario was used by the special services in the Middle East and the Caucasus against the Turkish army during the same period. Nevertheless, the events in the North of Russia are most indicative from the point of view of informational support technologies for intelligence interventions. In particular, in order to achieve the right to implement the project of reconnaissance operation against Soviet Russia, being aware of D. Lloyd George’s interest in this region, the leaders of the secret services in 1918 stepped up their work in this direction. As an example, information on the quantitative indicators of the work of the British special services, collected through the analysis of 25 intelligence reports on the situation in Russia received at the disposal of the Entente Supreme War Council in 1918, is presented in Table 1.

Table 1: Intelligence Support of the Preparation and Conduction of the Intervention in the Russian North ^{[7, ñ. 110-669]}

Thus, having the opportunity to actualize certain subjects in intelligence reports, limiting the range of possible alternatives of respond already at the level of intradepartmental analysis, the actions of the special services were consistent with the concept of «opportunistic behavior» as it was defined by O.E. Williamson: «adherence to one’s own interests including… such obvious forms of deception as lie, stealing, fraud» ^{[16, ñ. 26]}.

The content of intelligence reports is also very distinctive, since in them practically all strikes, rallies and terrorist acts in European countries (Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland, etc.), basing on the affirmations of secret agents, were presented as part of the Bolsheviks’ plans to inspire the world revolution. At the same time, it was the European North of Russia that the heads of the secret services pinned their main hopes with for the possibility of organizing an effective anti-Bolshevik struggle, although the reports of agents in the region indicated the inability of this theater of military operations to be used in this capacity ^{[9, ë. 27/189/18]}. However, such messages were ignored and their content was not brought to the attention of Cabinet members.

As a result, the plan for an intelligence intervention in the Russian North did not take into account many factors of a socio-economic, military-political, geographic, and demographic nature. Apparently, its main problem was the underestimation of the enemy, which was the result of the shortcomings of the secret agents of the British intelligence structures and the lack of an objective analysis of the data. The struggle between the special services for influence on the political decision-making process with a lack of qualified personnel and weak control procedures on the part of the legislative and executive authorities led to a wrong vision of the situation in the region. By the end of 1918, it became clear that the existing forces would not be able to achieve significant successes on the Northern Front of the Russian Civil War.

However, control over the information-analytical support of this operation allowed the intelligence agencies throughout 1919 to maintain the illusion of a positive development of the situation. For example, from September 1918 to September 1919, British intelligence structures prepared 44 reports directly or indirectly related to military, political and economic events in the Russian North. An analysis of these materials shows that the description of combat operations most often boiled down to listing the successes of the «white» troops and forces of the interventionists. In 29 reports (66%), victories over units of the Red Army were described in detail, and only 6 (13.6%) summaries dealt with its successes. As a rule, the scouts reported that the Soviet troops «retreated», were «driven out», «thrown back» or «defeated» ^{[7, ñ. 265-546]}. With the discrepancy between intelligence reports and the real state of affairs at the front or in the rear, the strategy chosen by the officers of the special services to reflect these events did not change, probably due to the fear of losing the confidence of the Cabinet members. Thus, the need to evacuate expeditionary forces from the Russian North in 1919 came as a shock to some members of the British political elite, whose vision of the situation in the region was formed only through intelligence reports.

In fact, the content of intelligence reports was distorted in such a way as to, firstly, push the Cabinet to approving the plans of intervention, and then – to hiding the failures in the implementation of these plans.

On the example of the British intervention in the Russian North, one can observe how the information provided by the secret services at the «right» moment and from a certain angle of view, forms the basis for the escalation of armed conflicts, for which there could be no real grounds. Having received at its disposal the function of advising political leaders on a wide range of issues, intelligence not only became an important part of the decision-making mechanism, but also acquired the ability to direct the actions of state in a favorable to secret services heads’ direction. In this context, intelligence and counterintelligence agencies acquire the features of an actor of the conflict, and can direct the actions of the state’s military forces – in other words, the state security function is being transformed. If, under normal conditions, the functions of the special services, as a rule, are reduced to resource conservation, in the situation we have described, intelligence takes over managerial functions.